Havemercy (22 page)

All I managed to say was, “Oh. Oh, yes, I see.”

“I wouldn’t wish to be so ungrateful for my brother’s hospitality as to steal from him the tutor he’s been training all this time to teach his children,” Royston concluded. “I doubt also that you would be the sort of young man who’d wish to worry them so, having them think you’d taken advantage of their kindness, only to leave them at the last.”

“Of course not,” I said, almost too fiercely. “I made a promise to them—”

“And I can see plainly enough how much you love those children.” Royston closed his eyes for a moment, and swallowed. “What I think is this. During the day, we must keep away from each other. We must stop this madness of meeting in the hallways every chance we have, or whispering between ourselves in the living room. You do understand what this would appear to them to be?”

“Yes,” I said, though I regretted it. “Yes, of course. I can’t neglect the children, after all.”

“Exactly,” Royston said. “We’ll keep our hours of study to the evenings—perhaps earlier?”

I nodded, and then there was nothing left for us to discuss. We’d solved everything and nothing at once.

If my life worked as a roman—as it secretly unfolded page by page in my innermost thoughts—I would have pressed myself against him and told him to teach me all those things he knew that I did not, to cup my face in his hand the way he’d done before in the boathouse. I would open my mouth to his, and this time, he wouldn’t pull away.

Instead, I opened the volume of Ke-Han verse and asked, “Ah, yes. Where were we?”

“Page twenty-eight,” Royston said softly, leaning close to flip the pages for me, and without a moment’s pause he leaned back once more against the pillows to listen to me read.

THOM

The first air raid I was privy to during my stay at the Airman came in the middle of the night. I saw no one and heard nothing above the blasting, howling cry of the siren, though I had made my way to the hallway to see what I could discover. There was a light flashing on and off in the hall, but by the time I’d collected my thoughts and realized over the stuttering of my heart what must have been happening, the siren had stopped ringing and the light was only flickering, unsteadily, over my head. In the siren’s wake was an awful, swallowing silence—the kind of silence you imagine at the bottom of a country lake or well, deep and dark and unforgiving.

I was tired, uncertain; my heart was still hammering. I’d not been schooled in these procedures. They were of utmost state secrecy, and I’d already been given more information than any other person of my standing and position—and for all I knew everyone had gone, leaving me alone to fend for myself in this eerie silence. It would have been much easier, I thought, if I’d been given a contingency plan: some slip of paper that told me what I should do in case of an air raid.

It was just when I was about to give up and head back to my makeshift bedroom, where I would try—and no doubt fail—to rediscover sleep that a doorway at the end of the hall opened and from it spilled a golden shaft of light.

I recognized the location after a moment of searching for the knowledge. It was Adamo’s room.

“There you are,” Adamo said, stepping out mere moments later. “I take it the alarm woke you?”

“I take it the alarm was designed with waking people in mind,” I replied. My ears were still ringing.

“Only Rook, Ace, and Ghislain have gone,” Adamo explained brusquely. “It’s the weekend, which means they’re the ones on night duty.”

“I see,” I said, which was a blatant lie.

“Everyone else went back to sleep,” Adamo said. I was going to ask how they managed it—I would never be able, no matter how many times I heard that bell in the middle of the night, simply to roll over in my bed and fall back asleep in a matter of seconds—but then I supposed this was why I wasn’t a member of the corps, and held my tongue. “There might be another raid tonight, but probably not. It might even just be a false alarm. Raids are usually only called for one of three reasons, those being that the Ke-Han are at our doorstep—which is pretty unlikely—or that one of the watchtowers to the east’s been attacked. Third reason’s if we’ve been fighting awhile already and th’Esar gets it into his head that a preemptive hit’s necessary. Since we haven’t been fighting in a while, and since you don’t hear the alarms that’d indicate a city-breaching, I’d guess it’s the guard towers.”

He fell silent, seemingly unaware that this was the most he’d ever spoken to me.

I realized at once what I’d been too dazed, too tired, to understand until now. Adamo was being kind to me. After all, he wasn’t required to explain the situation or indeed any of the particulars to me. And yet, if I understood correctly, he’d stepped out of his chief sergeant’s quarters to let me know. Perhaps it wasn’t so very important to him, but considering the month I’d been having, I could have kissed him.

On second thought, I added dryly to myself, that was clearly not a system of rewards I should put into play at the Airman, of all places.

“Ah, yes. Thank you. I had wondered,” I said.

“So you should try for some more sleep yourself,” he concluded, then jerked one hand behind him. “That’s where I’m headed. And tomorrow, you might want to lay off it. The boys’ll be tired, on edge. It’s been a long time since the bell sounded, if you catch my meaning.”

“I do. I’ll keep it in mind. Of course,” I said, all very quickly. “Thank you again.” I was on the verge of adding a tentative but nevertheless friendly good night when the door snicked shut, leaving the hall empty and dark and utterly silent once more.

Well, I thought. It might have been second nature to the members of the corps, but I’d only been there a month. Though I returned to my couch, I found myself wide-awake, nerves still jangling, heart still skipping its usual rhythm when I remembered the shock of the raid bell, or when I thought that at any moment it was likely to sound again. How any of these men managed to sleep, I had no idea.

For a long time I stared at the ceiling, calming my thoughts, but the comfortable ambling path of my mind just before sleep continued to elude me. I let my mind wander, but it was too much engaged. I was thinking about the dragons and, admittedly, their riders. What sort of men, I wondered, would volunteer for such a job? It shouldn’t ever have come as a surprise to me that I was dealing with madmen, with lunatics, with perhaps the criminally insane. They were capable of waking instantly at the sound of the bell, suiting up, and shipping out before I’d even rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It was a miraculous talent, certainly, but who would ever knowingly choose such a way of living?

The dragons’ choices had something or other to do with it, but they chose from a group of volunteers—from men willing to die at the drop of a hat or at the sound of a bell. Though for many of them, I began to realize, it’s what they had been trained for since birth, perhaps creating a mentality an outsider would find difficult to understand.

My mind veered off after that to uninformed theories on the dragons and the mechanisms that ran them, half motor and half magic. Their greatest attributes were speed, stealth, the ability—despite their limited capacity for fuel, and what it did to their range—to raze an entire Ke-Han city to the ground. And, of course, there was the fact that the technology was ours and ours alone. The Ke-Han had no comparable army in the skies. The corps was th’Esar’s greatest triumph and Volstov’s ace in the hole. Admittedly, the Ke-Han had still found a way to make things particularly dangerous for them. In the earlier years it had been the catapults, firing great rocks into the sky before any of the first airmen had really got the hang of flying their dragons. We’d adapted around that, though, and the next dragons created had been sleeker, swifter, and the catapults had become relatively obsolete. Next, and perhaps most successfully, the Ke-Han had capitalized on their skills with wind magic, coupled with the mountains that so often landed dead center of the battlefield. They’d never brought a dragon down in large enough pieces for it to be of any use to them, but they’d brought one or more to ruin in the mountains, along with their airmen.

These days, the biggest vulnerability concerning the dragons was the amount of fuel their sleek bodies could hold. It wasn’t enough to get into Lapis and back properly, and Lapis was where the Ke-Han kept their magicians. The more fuel they carried, the heavier they were and the slower they flew, and so on. The system hadn’t yet been perfected, so that the farthest the dragons could reach were the Ke-Han watchtowers stationed along the mountains and their troops stationed around them.

If the war continued for another fifty years, perhaps the technicians would have time to solve the problem.

Still, there was a lot riding on the airmen, both on nights when the bell rang and on nights when it didn’t.

I passed my hand over my eyes, rubbing blearily at them. What I couldn’t get behind, I decided at last, wasn’t the sound of the siren, nor even the flying, for I had no fear of heights. Rather, it was the fire. Most children who grow up in Molly or along the Mollyedge are trained to hate and fear fire; in Molly’s cramped, winding streets and cluttered tenements, fire spreads too quickly to contain and kills without prejudice and without remorse the unlucky, the lame, the very young, and the very old. I lost my brother to one such fire, and naturally have been averse to them ever since.

After that, I was taken in by a few young women who tricked their trade at a House on Tuesday Street; a fire nearly claimed them two years later, when I was five. I can’t say they moved up in the world after that, but rather cut their losses and dove deeper into Molly, bringing me along with them. I stayed for ten years, even once things became a bit dodgy. It was there that I forgot my brother’s face—since, after all, I’d only known him for three years—and there that I taught myself three languages, the requirement for applying to ’Versity Prep, by studying in the prop room behind the hapenny-for-a-peek burlesque to the sound of Gin the Rattler’s uncertain piano tunes. One year there was even a trumpeter, but he was a hopeless sot, and he was found halfway through his contract facedown in a gutter, and once that happened it was only old Gin hammering away at the half-remembered melodies.

All of this was long past. It was only the late hour and my unfortunate bout of insomnia that caused me to remember them. I wasn’t often prone to such nostalgic indulgences.

I was just on the verge of drifting off again—in the midst of wondering what it was my brother really did look like—when I heard the sound of a door slamming, followed by raucous laughter and approaching footsteps. The voices I heard a few moments later I recognized immediately. Rook, Ace, and Ghislain were coming toward the common room, and my only recourse was to pretend I was sleeping.

Luckily, they stopped just beyond the door; I heard them talking, muted, through the wall. A few nervous laughs punctuated the distant conversation.

“Fuck”—and that was Rook—“if I wouldn’t’ve taken a dive if it wasn’t for that trick you pulled at the last fucking second!”

“You’ve been holding out on us, Ghislain,” Ace—it must have been Ace—agreed.

“It was just a dive, only without the falling off,” Ghislain pointed out. Only Ace laughed at that one, but it was the sound of Rook’s voice that fascinated me most. It had changed. It was no longer a sullen child’s, neither stubborn nor prideful, defensive nor prejudiced, but laced with fierce excitement.

“Fuck, but it was sweet,” Rook said. He was entirely breathless.

If only I could have moved, sat up, or even reached for something to write on. I had the strange and sudden urge to document this moment for posterity, that I might remember it in the morning as real and not the deluded fabrication of my mind left to its own devices. Even with the airmen’s distraction, I didn’t trust my own movements to be stealthy enough to escape their attention, especially keyed up as they were from the raid.

No, with my luck, I would knock a table over, announcing my eavesdropping presence more assuredly than any air-raid siren.

“I only did what I had to,” said Ghislain, and his voice sounded calmer than the rest.

“Saved my life or damn near to it.” It was the first time I’d heard Ace sound wide-awake, focused. He cursed cheerfully. “I thought I’d never see anything outside of that tornado again! Lucky for me you’ve got lead weights in your ass the same as your dragon. Ke-Han; who’d have guessed? They’ve got balls on ’em, if nothing else.”

“Thank the bastion for that. Another day on the ground and Havemercy’d’ve lost it.”

“You mean you’d have lost it,” said Ace, but it was a cheerful rejoinder, with none of the venom or snapping I’d grown accustomed to hearing from them whenever the airmen interacted in a group, or especially when Ace and Rook were alone.

Breathing shallowly, holding carefully still despite the fact that no one had attempted to enter the room, I remained possessed by a feeling I could not name or did not want to. In short: I was awestruck. I’d spent weeks trying to divine what it was that kept these men together and allowed them to function as a team when all I’d seen of them appeared to be grave dysfunction and an unwillingness to do whatever it was they were told. These were men contrary as cats and solitary as lone wolves, and all the information I’d gathered to this point added up to indicate that logically, they could not and would not function as a team.

Except logic appeared to have taken a leave—perhaps the sirens had scared it away—and outside my door the three men continued to converse as perfectly natural human beings. A little nervous and on edge, certainly, but it was the kind of jump that anyone got from a rush of adrenaline, and it held none of their usual sparking hatred.

“Think the war’s on for good again?” Rook’s voice practically trembled on this last, with enough eagerness to inspire in me a peculiar mix of revulsion and intrigue. Only a man so cold as Airman Rook would crave the resumption of something as destructive as Volstov’s hundred-years war with the Ke-Han.